Monday, April 29, 2019

I woke up with the idea "Gingerbread Manbaby" in my head. A perfect terrible idea that wrote itself into this nonsense over the morning.

Once upon a time, in a micro-home in Connecticut, there lived a little old lady and a little old man. They lived in a very environmentally sustainable and intellectually fulfilling way, but they were very lonely as they had no children of their own.

One day, the little old woman (who was an excellent Python developer) baked a giant gingerbread man and went into town to visit the local makerspace. With a Raspberry Pi and a little know-how, she brought the gingerbread man to life.

Now, at first, the little old woman and the little old man were happy to be less lonely. They had someone to spend time with and hopefully pass on their legacy, but most importantly, they had a third player for Catan.

Sadly, the Gingerbread Man was very good at board games and never lost, which might not have been so bad, except he said a lot of very unsportsmanlike and unpleasant things during the game. At the end of every game, he said, “I've beaten a little old lady and a little old man, you can't beat me, I'm the Gingerbread Man!” which was probably the last unpleasant and unsportsmanlike thing he said but the repetition of it got quite unbearable. Afterwards he would let it a nasty, high-pitched, nasal little laugh and run off and lock himself away in his room.

As if this were not enough, he was generally obnoxious and unsociable. He would leave piles of dirty dishes in the sink for his parents to clean (that is if he didn't leave them tucked away in every corner of his unpleasant room). He never locked the front door or shut the gate when he went to buy miniatures from the local game store (which he bought with his parents’ credit cards, because he refused to get a job). And worst of all, he blew through their ISP's data cap in the first few days of every month downloading anime porn (which he loudly explained was Hentai, and a genuine art form).

Unfortunately, at no point in all this did anyone attempt to eat him. Despite being made of gingerbread, he was rather unhealthy looking. There were unnatural orange and greenish stains around his face from his diet of Cheetos and Mountain Dew, and he was moist and bloated in the middle from his carb and soda heavy diet. Exercise was unknown to him and if anyone had tried to chase him, they would have found it an easy task, but his unappealing state meant that didn't happen.

So life continued on in a miserable stasis for quite some time. The Gingerbread Man's parents had to endure his unsociable behaviour and unpleasant opinion of their Catan skills. Netflix was utterly unusable because of their constant bump against their bandwidth cap. The Gingerbread Man's taunt never got any longer, because although he had amassed enough miniatures to field a 5,000 point Space Marine army, nobody else would play any games with him.

Things finally changed one day when, on his way to buy some anime figurines, the Gingerbread Man once again left the front gate unlocked and a fox got in the house. The little old lady and little old man could easily have shooed the fox out of the house, but honestly they were finally tired of all this and, noting that foxes aren’t particularly picky eaters, rather hoped the inevitable would happen.

As it came to be, the fox did not eat the Gingerbread Man, but it did turn out he was a particularly unlikeable fox who had his own virtually untested 5,000 point Space Ork army. He and the Gingerbread Man quickly struck up an unwholesome friendship, even if it was one that was generally defined by yelling at each other over why the one’s Ork had clearly failed to kill the other’s Space Marine (regardless what the dice said), and they all lived happily ever after. And the best part was that the little old lady and little old man didn’t have to play Catan with the Gingerbread Man ever again.